Wednesday, December 23, 2015

one thing is clear about clickbait: It’s increasingly hard to pin down. Some, like Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith, narrowly define it as an article that doesn’t deliver on its headline’s promise. Others think it means vapid listicles, quizzes, and Betteridge’s Law headlines. And then there are those who simply use it as shorthand for stuff they don’t like on the Internet.

Here’s what most people can agree on: Clickbait is annoying, but by god, it works—even when readers recognize it for what it is. The word’s substantial semantic drift may be behind some of this effectiveness. But a hefty helping of behavioral science is at play, too. As a number of new studies confirm, you can blame your clickbait habit on two things: the outsized role emotion plays in your intuitive judgements and daily choices, and your lazy brain.

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Clickbait doesn’t just happen on its own. Editors write headlines in an effort to manipulate you—or at least grab your attention—and always have. “Headless Body In Topless Bar,” and “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” wouldn’t exist if publications didn’t care about attracting eyeballs. The difference with clickbait is you’re often aware of this manipulation, and yet helpless to resist it. It’s at once obvious in its bait-iness, and somehow still effective bait.

This has a lot to do with emotion and the role it plays in our daily decision-making processes, says Jonah Berger, who studies social influence and contagion at the University of Pennsylvania. Emotional arousal, or the degree of physical response you have to an emotion, is a key ingredient in clicking behaviors. Sadness and anger, for example, are negative emotions, but anger is much more potent. “It drives us, fires us up, and compels us to take action,” Berger says. If you’ve ever found yourself falling for outrage clickbait or spent time hate-reading and hate-watching something, you know what Berger is talking about. “Anger, anxiety, humor, excitement, inspiration, surprise—all of these are punchy emotions that clickbait headlines rely on,” he says.

A growing body of research supports this idea.

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In the mid-1990s, Loewenstein came up with what he called the “information-gap” theory. It basically holds that whenever we perceive a gap “between what we know and what we want to know,” that gap has emotional consequences. “Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity,” he wrote. “The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.”

In other words, not knowing is cognitively uncomfortable.

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Research has shown that humans are quite willing to put up with massive amounts of disappointment and frustration so long as there’s an occasional payout. And yes, sometimes clickbait does deliver these payouts … in spectacular fashion.

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It’s well established that humans are pre-programmed cute seekers. To our brains’ pleasure centers, there’s little difference between looking at cute animals and consuming sugar or having sex. Indeed, the same neurotransmitter, dopamine, is involved in all three behaviors.

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Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sopolsky summarizes the finding this way: “Dopamine is not about pleasure; it’s about the anticipation of pleasure. It’s about the pursuit of happiness rather than happiness itself.”

What’s really interesting is what happens when you reduce the reward frequency. When it comes only 50 percent of the time, dopamine levels go through the roof. In this sense, a violated promise isn’t a deterrent for clicking behavior, but rather an incentive. As Sopolsky says, “you’ve just introduced the word ‘maybe’ into the equation, and maybe is addictive like nothing else out there.” Psychologists call this intermittent reinforcement, and it basically means that one of the most effective ways to get a specific behavior out of a person is to introduce “perhaps” into the equation.